miniblog.

Is there any relationship between language adoption and the size of its standard library? These days it seems completely orthogonal, but early Java adopters spoke highly of the collections library compared with C++. Maybe it's the widespread availability of package managers?

Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)

TIL Tcl has a notion of 'safe interpreters', a mode where you can run untrusted code in a sandbox: https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/safe.htm Not many programming languages have this, but it's way safer to include in the implementation than try to build as a userland library.